


not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it

by themistyeyeofthemountain



Series: Stop all the clocks [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: And it also ends up being a James Potter and Sirius Black character study, Character Study, First War with Voldemort, Gen, M/M, Marauders, POV Lily Evans Potter, Religious Discussion, Sirius Black & Lily Evans Potter Friendship, This is a Lily Evans character study, What to do when you're twenty and fighting a war and find out you're pregnant.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:55:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24588697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themistyeyeofthemountain/pseuds/themistyeyeofthemountain
Summary: It's December, 1979, they're in the middle of a war, and Lily Evans finds out she is pregnant.Or: Lily Evans, not the wife (yet), not the mother (yet), but the woman and the witch.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Marlene McKinnon/Dorcas Meadowes, Sirius Black & Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin & Peter Pettigrew & James Potter & Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Series: Stop all the clocks [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/267181
Kudos: 20





	not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it

**Author's Note:**

> I just suddenly had a lot of feelings and opinions about Lily. This is the end product.
> 
> Warnings: mentions of abortion; use of the c*nt word when referring to Thatcher; use of regionalisms that I do not entirely master (if I've made a mistake concerning Irish/Black Country people please do let me know and I'll fix it!); discussion of dysphoria. Do let me know if you consider something else needs a warning.
> 
> This can absolutely be read as a stand-alone piece, but some minor references are made to the rest of this series and their years at Hogwarts.  
> 
> 
> Title from Richard Siken's "Snow and Dirty Rain":  
> "We have not touched the stars, / nor are we forgiven, which brings us back / to the hero's shoulders and a gentleness that comes, / not from the absence of violence, but despite / the abundance of it."

_No_ , Lily thinks, feeling herself implode with dread, like sick molasses erupting inside her. _No_ , as if the word is going to reverse the pale-coloured proof on the scrap of paper. The kitchen is still filled with the smell of the test-potion she spent the morning brewing; it’s so cold outside she couldn’t open the windows without freezing. _No_ , she thinks, and summons the past months of morning sickness and appetite swings.

In Seventh Year, one night she was wondering at what in Morgana’s name she was getting into with _James Potter_ , of all people, she had been on Alice’s bed, with the curtains drawn closed and a Silencing charm on. Alice, at seventeen, had already been so very sure of herself, of her love for Frank, of what was waiting for them in the near future – children, one day, undoubtedly. And Lily hadn’t been trying to scorn her friend’s wishes, just like she hadn’t been trying to give the idea of James Potter so much thought. She just felt she was being slowly –

“Domesticated.”

Alice huffed at that, her features carved in shadow with the slight _Lumos_ glow coming from her wand on the pillow. _Domesticated._ That was what her and Frank’s love felt like to Lily, in her heart of hearts she was ashamed of; that was what she feared when thinking of James Potter.

“What, like you’ll just blaze across life without loving anyone?” Alice bit back, stung.

“No, that’s not what I meant. I wasn’t talking about you two specifically,” Lily said, like a liar. “It’s rather – me, if I was in your place. Which I’m not. I think.”

“Of course.”

But that was the thing with Alice – she listened, and accepted, and knew Lily and her clumsiness down to her very bones.

“It’s just,” Lily tried again. “We’re so _young_.”

“So you don’t need to think about this now,” Alice answered. “It doesn’t have to be dramatic, Lils. Just go along with it.”

Right, Lily thought. Alice and Frank’s forever-and-ever didn’t need to extend to her as well. She had just turned seventeen. She could have a bit of fun. Who did really end up with schoolmates anyway?

“Lily, that’s _amazing_.”

And that’s the thing with James Potter, isn’t it. He takes the world and he says, _yes_ , and the world smiles back, like it was just waiting for him. Lily, she’s conflict coated in skin, war shoved up in a cupboard for years during which she tried to school herself into being proper, gentle, _kind_. Lily doesn’t do kind. It comes, sometimes, unexpectedly, when someone she loves is hurting –

(she remembers when Remus was so alone it was etched into his skin, when treason had been carved into his tall, lanky frame. Lily had been all quiet reassurances and gentleness, motherly, even. Inside, in that heart of hearts she’s ashamed of? She had been _seething_ ,

or when Dorcas had said, staring at the wall, straight ahead, as though ready to break anything that would not agree with her, “I like girls. Marlene, sometimes”. And Lily had seen the apology she consciously swallowed back down, and something told her that Dorcas and her, they were made of the same stuff. Bones like stone, unbending. That they would rather shatter than take one step back. She had smiled, softly, and said, “okay”,

or when her mother had died, in November when the shadows were long, and she had not cried once. Not when her father looked like he had been hollowed out with a spoon. Not when Petunia had sneered and said, _it’s you, you freak, you killed her_. She had always been good at planning. A funeral, as it turned out, was not that different from a Prefects roster.)

“Lily, that’s amazing,” James Potter says, as though he immediately understands the infinity of _life_ that has just bloomed between them. Wide-palmed, bright-eyed, always awed at the world, at her. Like he doesn’t feel her thorns, her doubts, her deep-marrowed anger. James Potter: the only coordinates of the world where she can be soft, like an underground river that comes out at a precise point in space – like he pulls her inside-out with a single glance.

There was this book she had read when younger, the one with the child and the fox. It had hurt. “Lily, that’s amazing,” James says, and all she can think of is the colour of wheat. He isn’t blond, so rolling fields don’t do it as an inescapable memento – but language does. She thinks, _kind_ , she thinks, _warm_ , she thinks, _strong_ , and the words all lead back to him. James Potter: the ground zero of signification, where even the ley-lines of herself change magnetic charges.

“Lily, that’s amazing,” her open-hearted love says, and she just smiles, brittle. They’re barely twenty.

Absurdity sometimes springs on you when you least expect it. For instance, when you tell your best friend, “I’m pregnant,” and her answer is, “Me too!”

Lily feels that the great metaphorical rug of certainty has been yanked from under her feet with no consideration whatsoever. “You _what_?” she asks (grimaces, really), and is, as always, glad that Alice knows her, because young Mrs Longbottom just dimples-smiles at her.

Thinking about it, once she’s left Alice after having recalled her manners and profusely congratulated her, Lily realises it’s Dorcas she needs to talk to. Dorcas and her rock-bones. She needs to voice it aloud to someone – not that she doesn’t _want_ the small thing in her belly, but rather like it doesn’t even feel like _her_ belly to begin with. Lily Evans, twenty years old, with child. There, that’s absurdity for you.

She loves James with all her being, all the atoms of her put together, but they can never have this conversation. They might as well be on two different planets concerning this.

She doesn’t know where Dorcas is. She and Marlene broke up the first autumn after Hogwarts, something about growing up. Moving on. Admitting it, Marlene had said to Mary and her, had been painful on its own. That was a school thing, Dorcas had said around her fag when they had gotten each other drunk, after Lily’s mother’s funeral. James was in the next room, helping her father like some thirty-year-old son-in-law. There’s something about the wizarding world that makes people grow faster, Lily had mumbled around the taste of wine in her mouth. No, Dorcas had said, stomping on her cigarette butt, That’s just the war, Evans.

It had struck Lily that she was the last Miss Evans alive. Petunia Dursley had left hours ago.

The point: she doesn’t know where Dorcas is. She doesn’t even know when she stopped knowing where Dorcas was. She thinks of James and Sirius, and Remus, and Peter, and cannot even imagine them not knowing where the other three are, inevitably, like they are each other’s North Pole.

She remembers when she learned that they were Animagi, when she learned what they had done, who they had become just for Remus’s sake. She remembers watching him, her friend, and thinking, with a mean spike of jealousy, _What makes him_ so _special that they will go through this for him_? She remembers being ashamed of her heart of hearts, and trying harder, being kinder, gentler, warmer, braver. And she remembers understanding why Remus always forgave them, for everything, and why he would always keep on forgiving.

That’s the thing about James Potter, isn’t it. (That’s how a lot of sentences begin when Lily thinks about James.) He gives, and he takes, and he is always ever so open and trusting that you can’t not bind yourself to him. His love is of a magnitude so great that the only thing you can give back is all of yourself. Every atom.

Lily feels sick.

The one thing with being Catholic that Lily could understand, with an understanding bordering on faith – the one thing her mother said that did make profound sense to her

(apart from the God-is-love thing. It does make sense, even now, in a utopian sort of way. In a I-wish-I-could- _believe_ -that sort of way. They joined the Order not one month after leaving Hogwarts, and Lily knows that war and grief would have been much more bearable with her mother’s clover-scented faith.)

was the bit about free will. Your belief has no meaning, no weight, if you’re not free to believe. Choice, that’s what matters in the end. The choice she made to stick with Severus until his hatred was too much. The choice she made to keep trying with Petunia, if only for their parents’ sake, until her mother was in a grave. The choice she made to look at Dumbledore in the eye that one time they were in his office with James, a few months from graduation, and to say _Headmaster, I will fight_. The choice she makes to be kind, to be brave, always and despite everything else. The choice she makes with James, over and over again, even though being with him sometimes scares her so much she can’t breathe. She chooses to let herself love and be loved, to ignore the small voice that’s whispering _you’re tied down_. Staying is a choice, one she is glad she is brave enough to make.

Lily knows she is a good actress. Mostly she doesn’t fake anything; she just chooses to let some things shine through and others, not so much. Her doubts, her jagged edges, her deep, deep _anger_ , those she keeps to herself. She is prouder of her efforts than of her core stuff.

This, right now, is a moment of choice as well. And she knows who to speak with.

“Remus?” she asks, standing before the door. She hopes he is around – she knows he’s working on something for Dumbledore these days, but James has told the other three last night, so he should still be in London. Logically speaking.

(She really, really hopes he is going to open that door.)

She knocks again, a bit louder. James hadn’t asked the question,

( _do we want to keep it?_ )

as though it were obvious. Maybe Purebloods don’t have abortion. Maybe they don’t talk about it.

She lifts her hand to knock again, but the door opens before she has touched it, and Sirius Black is on the other side of it.

“Oh. Hello there, Lily. How d’you do?” he asks, surprised, reverting back to polished speech-patterns. He couldn’t not sound well-bred if he tried. Or maybe that’s just a choice he hasn’t made. He runs his slate-grey eyes on her, and she knows what he is thinking, that she has his best mate’s child in her. Like a vessel. A thing filled with significance.

“I was hoping to see Remus, actually,” Lily says, not asking, _don’t you have your own flat_ , because they’ve never talked about it, not really, and Lily knows it’s complicated – but she also knows that Sirius’s eyes always find Remus in a room, always, like his own ley-lines share a single vanishing point, one that drinks ungodly amounts of Earl Grey.

“Er, Moony’s not here. But come on in, I’ll make you a cuppa, something,” Sirius says, and she follows him, because he is James’s best friend, but he is also hers, somehow, a little. Her own friend. She likes to think James isn’t the filter between her and the rest of the world.

The flat is small and filled with cardboard boxes and piles of books, a leather jacket strewn on the back of a chair, dog hair in the corners, unfinished cups of tea.

“Two sugars, dash of milk, right?” Sirius asks from the kitchenette, because he knows how she takes her tea. _My friend_ , she thinks, and feels a bit warmer.

“Actually, no milk at all. Doesn’t sit well any more,” she answers. That’s how it starts, dispossession: she's lost the way she drinks her tea. Stabbed in the back by her own body.

Sirius has been raised in the midst of the elite of aristocracy. Somewhere so high up that Lily would need an oxygen mask to breathe. With rules and magic she doesn’t know, can’t understand, that scare her in their absolute foreignness. He has been raised with _manners_ , and _tact_ , and the distillated English ability to never ask anything remotely personal.

He has also been raised in a dormitory with three other teenage boys.

“Why did you want to see Moony?” he asks simply, setting the cup in front of her. She is on a battered armchair and he sits astride on a chair he swings away from the small kitchen-table. Lily hasn’t planned on saying anything to Sirius. He may be hers, in a minute way, but he is James’s, first and foremost and always. Perhaps even more than Remus’s.

She hasn’t planned on saying anything to him, but she carries the slip of pregnancy-test paper in her pocket, hasn’t eaten in two days, and is just thankful that James is running a time-sensitive errand for Dumbledore because the horrid feeling of _doubt_ that eats at her wasn’t made for him to witness.

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” she blurts out, surprised at herself. Sirius blinks but doesn’t move. He just listens. “The… the baby, I mean.” It’s the first time she says the word. “We’re at war. We’re – we’re so young.”

Her voice breaks on the last word, and she _hates_ it, hates that weakness can so easily slither up her throat.

“Yeah,” Sirius says. “It was an accident, wasn’t it,” he says, and she starts crying right then and there. “Talk to me, Lily,” he says, and she blubbers out her hideous stinking pile of doubt and fear.

One thing about Sirius Black: he doesn’t do kindness, either. He isn’t soft, isn’t warm, isn’t safe. He’s sharp and hard and biting and he hurts people. He had learned to reign it in, a little, after that debacle at the end of their Fifth year, but he hasn’t been trying as long as Lily has, nor as hard. He doesn’t dull his edges for anyone because he doesn’t bother to, aside from a special few people who are made to feel like they deserve it.

Another thing about Sirius Black: although he knows how Lily used to take her tea, she would never have chosen him as a confidante. First, because he is James’s, perhaps even more than she is. Second, because she remembers growing up alongside him, parallel lines that took years to cross paths, and she knows he lives in a black-and-white chequered world. Third, because she’s always known he has the emotional understanding of a clam.

Lily Evans likes to be proved wrong. It helps her become better, every time she realises she didn’t have it right.

“There’s a lot to unpack here,” he says once she’s done blubbering and she is blowing on her miraculously still warm tea. Remus is speaking through his mouth. That’s what years of cohabitation will do to people: they rub off each other until everyone speaks in borrowed tongues. Lily makes a bags of things when she messes up, and can feel her Ma right behind her; and Marlene’s Black Country _naaah_ still comes out, sometimes, when she isn’t paying attention. She tends to drop her h’s like Dorcas. She’s got the whole of the isles glued to her teeth, and Sirius has Remus’s gentle problem-solving cadence on his tongue when looking at her.

“The body thing,” he says, “that’s why you wanted to talk to Moony, right?”

She can only nod. He grimaces, sips on his tea, puts the mug down on a precarious tower of books.

“I don’t – he’s far more qualified than I am for this, you’re right.” Lily snorts. “But. That’s okay, Lily. That’s – that’s big news, a big transformation. It’s not you, but it’s not not you. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

Lily sips her tea. She misses the taste of milk. Suddenly, Sirius stiffens on the chair in front of her, and, ever so careful, his d’s and t’s clicking on a marble floor, he asks:

“You do want it, right? The baby, I mean.”

And that’s the question, isn’t it. James didn’t ask, because James wants everything the world has to give, because James has an unlimited supply of love and acceptance. And Alice didn’t ask because she was so wrapped up in her own joy, her own _want_. Lily says as much.

“And did you talk to Prongs about it?”

“No, of course I haven’t, Sirius, _Padfoot_. He’s – he’s a father already, it’s like he’s the one who’s pregnant, who has it easy –”

“He’s scared out of his bloody mind, Lils. Almost started crying right in front of us, I thought Pete was going to have a stroke.”

Lily stops, stares at Sirius.

“He… he didn’t say.”

“Neither did you.”

Right.

“It’s just so… _definite_ ,” she says, because now that she’s here she better spill everything out. “It’s like I don’t have a choice anymore. Like I have to stick with a choice I made when I was seventeen.”

“Well. You could always, you know. Get rid of it. It’s not too late, is it?”

So Purebloods _do_ know about abortion, after all. Lily doesn’t know if she’s angry or not that James didn’t mention it either way.

“My Ma,” she says instead. “She was Irish.” Sirius hums, because he knows. He was there at the funeral. They all were. “Very Catholic. Had a hard time of it. I’m almost glad she left before that – that _cunt_ was elected,” she spits, and Sirius raises an eyebrow at the word. “I don’t know if I still believe in God, but some things stay. I’m not against it – abortion, I mean. I just don’t know if I can do it, myself.”

And this, after all, is why Sirius Black was a good almost-choice. Because he knows better than anyone else what it is like to keep things you were brought up with, things you don’t really believe anymore, things that shouldn’t matter and yet do. Lily has a small golden cross on a chain around her neck. Sirius speaks like he is walking in a marble mansion. Some things stay.

“You’re not alone, you know,” he says instead on commenting on her faith, or lack thereof. “I mean, sure, you’re the one who’s got the sprog in your body, but you have Prongs. And us. Remus and I, and Wormtail. We’ll be – uncles, of sorts. Godfathers.”

This doesn’t solve anything, really. But Lily finds she can suddenly breathe a lot easier.

“You’re family, Lils,” Sirius says, and her heart twists because she _knows_ what that word means for him. “Prongs is my brother, you’re like my sister.”

“In-law, then.”

“Nah. Not everything’s about that git. Sister is fine.”

Lily laughs then.

They’ll have to get married, and soon. Because James’s family may not be a conventional Pureblood one, but they certainly haven’t been caught up by the free-love hippie seventies wave, and because Lily may not be sure she believes in God, but her Ma raised her Catholic and some things you cannot shake away. They’ll get married, and she will still gnaw on her doubt, but mostly she will be alight with happiness – because she loves James, and she is ready to love the little thing in her belly, and the rest are logistics. They’ll get married, and she will probably drop her name. She doesn’t want to be remembered as a wife, or as a mother. But she is twenty, and there will be time to do great things, once the war is over and won.

( _Be brave._ )

They are barely twenty. A few years ago, Lily used to look at twenty-year-old people and see adults. She was a fool, of course, but those are things that can only be discovered when growing up.

 _Talk to Prongs_ , Sirius says before kissing her cheek and watching her leave. Choices, she thinks. The choice to stay. The choice to try, and keep trying. The irremediable choice of a new adventure. _You’re tied down_ , a voice whispers, almost as cutting as the late-December wind that is roaming the streets of London.

( _Be kind._ )

She grips her wand, sets a gentle hand over her belly, and Apparates home.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, please do leave a kudo and comment if you've liked this! 
> 
> I was thinking of Lily, how in my mind her name is Evans but people remember her as Lily Potter, wife and mother.  
> And I was thinking of how you can love someone with your whole being and still not be certain. I was thinking about choices, and kindness that doesn't come naturally and is perhaps all the more precious for it.  
> And lastly I was thinking that Lily was my age when she realised she was pregnant, and I was like, yikes.


End file.
